Pfizer announced a goal to reduce the number of people in the world by 50%.
False. The company’s CEO announced a goal to reduce the number of people who could not afford their medicines by 50%. The video of him saying this was altered.
We’ve seen another example of a video on Facebook that has been edited to make it sound as though Albert Bourla, the chairman and CEO of the drug company Pfizer, said that their goal was to reduce the world’s population by 50%.
We have fact checked versions of this video twice before.
In fact, in the original video, recorded at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2022, Mr Bourla said: “One of [the goals for the next five years] was by 2023 we will reduce the number of people in the world that cannot afford our medicines by 50%. I think today this dream is becoming a reality.”
In the current Facebook video, the phrase “that cannot afford our medicines” is missing. Instead, Mr Bourla can only be heard saying: “One of [the goals for the next five years] was by 2023 we will reduce the number of people in the world by 50%.”
Pfizer, Mr Bourla and the WEF have been the subject of widespread misinformation online, which we have written about on many previous occasions.
Bad information can be dangerous if people use it to make decisions about their health.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because this video has been altered to change what Mr Bourla actually said.
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